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Interview with the founder of the Daily Kos

Good afternoon, welcome to WMNF's Radioactivity. I'm Rob Lorei. Coming up in a moment: an interview with the founder of one of the most influential blogs in the country, the {Daily Kos](http://www.dailykos.com). But first some listener comments about yesterday's program about Republican vice presidential nominee Sara Palin.

Our guest is the author of the new book Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era. He is Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the founder of Daily Kos, one of the most influential political blogs in the country with more than 1 million readers per day.

In 2002, in the leadup to the Iraq War, Zuniga wrote the first words on a blog that would become one of the most heavily trafficked in the world. Daily Kos was begun with the idea that the âself-appointed and unaccountable gatekeepersâ that were in charge of political discourse and the national conversation were no longer serving the countryâs citizens. An impassioned look at the rise of the netroots, Taking on the System offers rules of engagement for todayâs cultural and political activists: how to connect, coordinate, and command attention; how to embrace inevitable attacks and make them work for you; and how to design powerful narratives and drive them into the mainstream.

The web is poised to play an unprecedented role in the upcoming presidential election, and Markos is a pioneer in online, progressive activism.

Markos was born in El Salvador; his family came here to escape that country's civil war when he was 9 years old. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1990 and served in the first Gulf War. Later, he attended law school at Boston University. He joins us now. Markos, welcome to WMNF.